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Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community Ready For Download
joestar writes "The new Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community has just showed up on Mandrake's FTP mirrors and through Bittorrent. MandrakeClub Members benefit from extra CDs downloads and even a DVD ISO for Corporate Memberships! Another good news for the Mandrake community is an announce from Mandrakesoft that due to the stock resumed trading on Euronext on last Monday, with a nice increase of +10.00% in three days." Update: 03/11 06:23 GMT by T : Cheap ISOs are also available from merchants like OSDisc.com and CheapBytes.
I've been a big fan of Mandrake since 5.3. I stuck with them through a few x.0 fiascos and rarely been affected by whatever mistakes people have discovered. That being said, what Mandrake's done with 10.0 and the idea of the community release is to shorten the beta and RC cycle down, releasing a distro that's "mostly ready" so the final bugs can be worked out before the "official" version. I translate that to the community release being just another release candidate and have no plans to install it on my regular use home system (as opposed to the beta testing system I normally leave on Cooker) until they get the rest of the kinks worked out.
In the meantime, that former Cooker system is compiling the kernel for a LiveCD / i686 Stage 3 Gentoo 2004.0 install. I look forward to seeing just how different these 2 distros are to use on a daily basis. (Save any stage 1 for real performance comments. I did that back when 1.4 was released and didn't want to sit around so long again.)
I'll answer a lot of these...
> SuSE Linux installs more easily,
That's in the eye of the beholder, but I'm happy with the Mandrake 10.0 install process. The only problem I have with it is the configuration of wireless cards in that it's fairly complicated as compared to others.
> has a few nice mods to KDE (including recently used programs' links, ALA Windows XP style)
IIRC, that's standard in KDE 3.2+. The Mandrake 10.0 distro that I'm running right now has the "Most Used Applications" as well as "Recently Used Programs." I don't think that's a SuSE-only mod.
> and has YaST, a package installer GUI for rpms.
urpmi, and the gui of it, gurpmi, as well as rpmdrake and mandrakeupdate. IMHO, it doesn't get easier than clicking on it through the mandrake control center.
> YaST also functions to easily change configurations for NICs, displays, TV tuner cards, and more.
I've been able to change from my display on my laptop to my tv screen flawlessly. Also, Mandrake appears to be able to handle a change of my hardware without blinking, provided that it is of course, supported. I don't think that it's a distro thing, much more than a kernel/module thing.
Now, I'm not here to play the "My distro can beat up your distro" game, but let's not imply that SuSE can do all of these things, and Mandrake can't
Well I'll give it a go..
.. very nice when typing in browser windows, etc..
.. But since you sound like a KDE user, you probably already utilize most of these features. Just be glad your using KDE :)
Pros for KDE -->
- Wallet - makes storing passwords for KDE apps & websites secure and easy to manage.
- Konquerer - has tabbed browsing and other modern browser features, IE does not have these.
- Juk - great playlist based music player -- What does XP come with? Media Player? no thanks.
- Windows can be "shaded", "always on top", borders removed, made to fill the entire screen, etc.. kinda nice IMHO..
- Advanced keybindings
- KDE-wide spell check
- Advanced, built in editors such as Quanta, Kate, etc..
- Great multi-client IM (Kopete)
- OpenPGP encryption integration -- works great with Kopete, Kontact, etc..etc..
- Virtual desktops, fine-tuning over multi-monitor setups, etc..
- IMHO, great print subsystem (kprinter/cups) -- certains aspects of W2k/XP seemed umm.. hacked on (ie usb printer setups)
- Nice to look at Window decoration & widgets (plastik)
- User-level font management control -- I don't think XP has this (only global fonts)
- flexible sized panels (kicker/taskbar) -- make as many as you want, have them wherever you want, what size you want, etc...
- kioslaves -- use of fish:/ is awesome -- utilize remote servers via SSH as if they were local file systems..
- General responsiveness and speed seems better than XP -- XP seems to umm.. delay quite a bit for no apparent reason (ie 10-15 seconds or more at a time)
Of course, these are just some of the things I like about KDE over XP